The anti-didactic hypothesis

Charlton, James Martin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9066-4705 (2013) The anti-didactic hypothesis. In: Great Writing 2013, 29-30 June 2013, Imperial College London. . [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract

The teaching of Creative Writing often includes encouraging students to think about the premise of the work, which badly translated can mean "what is your work saying." Recent statements by the playwright and theorist Howard Barker might offer new routes for Creative Writing teaching and, more broadly, thinking about how the creative process works. Barker disavows rational knowledge of his work (though not skill in its construction) – rather positing that it is his job as a writer to use imagination in order to speculate around a hypothesis.

Barker distrusts Brecht and the notion that writers have anything to teach an audience. Using approaches gleaned from Barker's own writing and interviews on his own practice, new approaches to stimulating student's imaginative writing might arise. This is especially important to emerging writers, for whom being told to write what they know and have something to say might not be the best method, given they know little and so it might be presumptuous if they were writing works designed to instruct.

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